


Static made old radio

by la_dissonance



Category: Bandom, The Academy Is...
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-10
Updated: 2010-09-10
Packaged: 2017-10-21 20:34:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/229565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/la_dissonance/pseuds/la_dissonance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stupid boys being faily and stupid and confused and unable to communicate any of this. Also maybe a tiny bit in love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Static made old radio

**Author's Note:**

> Crack...which gets serious! Nothing is canon. I don't know. Originally posted September 2010 [here](http://la-dissonance.dreamwidth.org/110831.html)

Whenever they go on tour, Mike tends to get left behind a lot. Usually it's not a big deal; they never leave him very far behind – he'll come out of his bunk to a quiet bus, say, and find out after a very confused ten minutes poking around the parking lot that everyone left for a party in Fall Out Boy's bus while he was asleep. A quiet _What the fuck, Bill_ or a loud _Thought you could get rid of me that easy?_ was usually all it took to shake that feeling of disorientation, at least until next time.

The time in Pennsylvania, though, Mike's not going to forget that one for a while. The rest stop the driver pulls into is bright and labyrinthine, lighting up the wide interstate for miles in both directions. They pile off the bus and make a beeline for the food court, all eager for this source of food that does not come in packets.

Mike detours to the bathrooms, and by the time he finds his way back the rest of his band is no longer in the food court. He spends longer than is perhaps wise wandering around the complex looking for them (the stop couldn't have been _this_ short), but eventually he's forced to admit defeat.

Just as he's pulling out his phone to text Bill, he's cornered – literally cornered, swept up and trapped in a corner between a giant potted plant and the wall – by a pack of Pete's fangirls who somehow recognize him from the concert. For people who didn't even know his band existed until earlier that evening, they're awfully chatty, wanting to hear all about life on the road, and what it's like living with certain "totally fuckable" frontmen (Mike is half appalled and half gratified to hear that Bill already makes that list), what Mike thinks of their state, what they think of every single other Fall Out Boy show they've ever been too...

At this point they hardly need Mike's input to keep the conversation going. Mike's been eying the narrow space between the plant and the wall as a potential escape route for some time now, and when the tallest one stops for breath, he mumbles something unintelligible and ducks away.

Hiding deep in the cavernous men's room is an entirely reasonable action, recent events taken into consideration. Mike digs his phone out of his pocket and types off a quick message to Bill.

 _forget smthng?_

The reply comes back almost at once. _shiiiiiiit dude. lemme see if we can turn around._

Mike's too pissed to reply to that, really, so he just paces, contemplating the amount of damage the hard tile of the floor would cause if he were to throw his phone against it.

After an interminable wait – Mike is not nearly confident enough that the girls are gone to risk leaving the bathroom – a second message comes through. _sry cant turn around, sending someone to get you. wait by the doors we came in._

The text doesn't say that someone is going to be Tom, but that's who shows up in a battered Honda an hour later.

"It took a while to find a car," Tom says. He clears his throat like he's about to keep going, but doesn't volunteer where the car came from, or, for that matter, say anything else for the rest of the trip.

Mike is left to stare out the window at the sodium glow from the lights, growing and receding at regular intervals. The car smells like stale nachos and the passenger seat has a broken spring somewhere, and Tom is just staring straight ahead at the road, humming along with the radio under his breath as if he's alone in the car. Eventually, Mike drifts off to an uneasy sleep despite it all, too worn out to care.

When he wakes up again they're parked behind a anonymous-looking diner, early morning sunlight glaring off the metal of their tour bus on the other side of the lot. Rolling his neck to work the cricks out, Mike nearly smashes his head into Tom, who's hovering over him, hand tentatively outstretched.

"We're here," Tom says, sitting back in the driver's seat as if he hadn't just been about to do whatever it was he'd been planning.

They get out of the car and Mike catches himself wishing that the ride wasn't over, that he hadn't been asleep most of the time. It wouldn't be _nice_ , exactly, but he sort of resents the presence of the bus in the parking lot, and lets himself pretend that the rest of the band is still hours ahead, and Tom has pulled over here only to stretch his legs or because he's hungry and wants to treat Mike to pancakes. It would be awkward as fuck, Mike's not kidding himself; they would sit in the booth and the waitress would come over and ask _Now what can I get you two this morning_ , and they would talk to her and hardly say a word to each other. But it would be something, it would be their time to do with as they saw fit. Mike and Tom hardly ever end up alone together.

When they enter the bus the driver nods at them and starts up the engine; everything else is silent. Butcher's snores are the only thing that greet them when Tom unlatches the flimsy door to the bunk area.

Tom doesn't go straight to his bunk; instead, he crouches down in front of Bill's and twitches back the curtain. Mike is stuck behind him in the narrow space, and he stills, waiting awkwardly. "I brought him back," Tom says, reaching out to shake Bill's shoulder but pulling back when Bill blinks his eyes open unprompted.

"Mmmmgh," Bill says, and tries to look around Tom to Mike. Mike gives a half-wave, half-salute, figuring he can save the name-calling until it's properly tomorrow. Bill's head falls back onto his pillow, and after a second, Tom lets the curtain close.

Mike tries to catch Tom's eye, but he just shuffles to the end of the aisle without turning around and climbs up to his bunk. Mike continues to stand there for a long minute after Tom pulls his curtain shut, waiting for who-knows-what, not ready for this strange night to be over, but eventually he shakes himself out of it and retreats to his own bunk.

Sleep isn't fast to come, but Mike refuses to dwell on any of it, not Tom or his weird silences or unexplained presence. He thinks about guitar lines, going methodically down the set list for their show, and he thinks about what he's going to make himself for lunch when he wakes up again, and he plays a chess game with Bill in his head, and somewhere along the way, he manages to fall asleep again.

\--

The next few days are a study in banality; there is no shift in routine. Mike would be lying if he said he _expected_ a shift, but he got completely left behind, one could at least ask for a minor fuss to be made. But no, this incident is forgotten and brushed aside as quickly as all the others, leaving only Mike to remember the long silences and might-have-beens. He should probably really stop obsessing about this.

On Tuesday, four days after the Pennsylvania incident, Mike gets left behind from a bar crawl when he's out back on his phone when everyone decides to leave. He doesn't text Bill or go out looking for them when he returns to an empty bus, though the impulse is there. This time, it seems like it would be better... not to. Instead he settles in the back lounge with all the lights off and the TV on to the Spanish language channel. Mike doesn't speak Spanish; he took Italian in high school and doesn't speak any of that either.

If he were out with Bill and Adam and Andy and everyone, he'd be halfway drunk by now, probably playing darts or pool or something, acting raucous and not thinking of much at all. Maybe Tom would be back by the bar, hanging close to Bill like he always does, his one drink in his hands, nursing it because he never seems to like getting too fucked up when they're in a new city. Mike has no idea why not.

Maybe Mike would watch him out of the corner of his eye all night, paying most of his attention to the game but keeping that one little bit aside for Tom, hoping he'd order another drink so they could keep up, hoping that later on they'd meet in the alley behind the bar, take turns pressing each other to the rough brick of the wall and get this thing over with.

Tom hasn't been with the band for too long yet, but it should have been long enough for Mike to notice if there was some sex thing between them. He had noticed that Tom was pretty, sure enough, but he'd never connected the dots further than that. Until the night in Pennsylvania, he'd never gotten the vibe from Tom that there might _be_ more dots to connect. Less of a pretty face and more of a mask, then, Mike thinks with a twist of spite. He's hooked up with guys on tour before – not guys from his own band, no, but it can't be that different – and as long as no one gets all cagey and _weird_ about it, these things work out fine. Exhilarating, easy, and over once you both get it out of your systems. Either Mike's getting entirely the wrong vibe off this situation, or Tom isn't playing fair.

Fuck, Mike had really not planned on spending the whole night lying in the dark thinking about Tom, but dwelling on it only makes Mike want to sink back into that fantasy world and replay the images behind his eyes so he can have something to leer at Tom about next time they're in the same room together. Maybe that would shake him out of his weird silence, make him do something he actually meant.

Mike has half a mind to catch up with everyone anyway, leave the bus and find his way the bar they're at by now; he could even text someone and find out for sure where to go, but instead he just ends up slipping his hand into his shorts, so unplanned he barely realizes what he’s doing before it's happening. He moves quickly, even though he knows he won't be interrupted, stroking fast before he's even had the chance to get fully hard.

The images that flash behind his eyelids are no different from usual, but if he steers them more toward crowded bars and brick walls the more he gets into it, and if he maybe comes a lot harder than usual, that's not his problem. This weird not-thing that's been going on since Pennsylvania (hell, maybe even before, Mike makes no claims at being a perceptive guy) is firmly in Tom's court – Tom started it, and only he knows where it might be going. It's _Tom's_ thing.

When he's done, Mike walks to the closet-like bus bathroom and rinses off his hand, thinking about nothing at all besides how Adam really needs to stop leaving his dirty socks in here. How does that even happen?

Mike is asleep by the time everyone else returns.

\--

They're over at the Fall Out Boy bus again tonight, doing jello shots and talking shit about the venue before last. The bus is packed by the time Mike and Sisky show up, and they're beckoned over to do a round of shots by a grinning Pete almost the second they walk in.

"Hey, where's Mike?" it's Tom's voice, pitched to carry over the noise of too many bodies crammed into too small a space.

Mike looks up and catches Tom's eye, standing over by where Bill and Jon are sitting, craning his neck to see to the door. Bill says something then, and Tom breaks eye contact, leaning down to hear. A second later Mike's phone buzzes, a text from Bill flashing across the screen. _We're in the fob bus, haul your ass over here_ it reads.

Mike pushes his way through the people in the lounge. "Dude," he says, tapping Bill on the shoulder, even though he's looking at Tom out of the corner of his eye. "Dude, I'm right here."

"Glad you could make it," Bill says, his eyes crinkling up around the corners as he smiles.

"You're getting paranoid," Mike says, smiling back, although he's definitely looking more at Tom now.

Jon says something, and Mike's attention is pulled away for a second; when he looks back Tom has disappeared into the crowd.

\--

"Tom's been acting weird," he says the next day, when it's just him and Bill and Sisky in their tiny dressing room waiting for the set to start, the others lagging behind. Sisky is absorbed with his phone, so only Bill looks up.

"Yeah?" he says, nominally interested.

"You haven't noticed?" Mike asks, and Bill shrugs.

"Why, what does Tom normally act like? If he's been, like, following you around too and giving you the puppy-dog eyes and shit, I'll – I mean, he's a nice guy, but so _clingy_." Bill shakes his head, his brow furrowed.

"What? No," Mike says, slightly taken aback.

"Then what?" Bill makes an expansive hand gesture, like his problems are the only ones allowed to exists. Bill can be really irritating sometimes.

Mike frowns "Dunno. Different from this. He's been avoiding me."

"No, he hasn't," Bill says. "There was that time, that time in Pennsylvania. He fucking volunteered to go get you man, he hunted down someone with a car to borrow and everything."

"Huh," Mike says, because this is a side of the story he's never heard before, no matter how many times he's imagined it.

"He totally did," Adam pipes in. "It was out of nowhere. We were all ready to hijack the bus, if need be."

"But since then," Mike presses. "He's been weird."

Then Butcher and Tom walk in, and the conversation dies.

Mike catches Tom's shoulders hunching for just a second before he relaxes again, and wonders if he heard them from the hall, knows they were talking about him.

\--

It's after a show, one of those rare instances when circumstances collaborate to give Mike and Tom more than a couple seconds alone together. Everyone else is off showering. Mike had spotted a Tom-shaped shadow huddled in a corner, fiddling with the setting on his camera, and he hadn't felt like heading off to the showers just yet.

Mike doesn't announce his presence until after he's already stopped right in front of Tom, boxing him in. Tom shifts his weight, giving away nothing about how being caught in a corner with Mike might affect him, only barely looking up from his camera to acknowledge Mike's presence.

"So, that time," Mike says. "That time on the highway, when you came and got me."

"So?" Tom shrugs a little, but Mike stares him down until he fidgets uncomfortably. "Someone had to go get you. You're always letting yourself get left behind."

"You could have let someone else do it," Mike counters.

"So?" Tom says again.

"So, I noticed."

Tom gives him an incredulous look, then pushes past Mike and is gone before Mike can move to catch him. A flare of frustration burns in Mike's gut, and he lashes out, hitting the wall with his open hand hard enough to make his fingers go numb. It doesn't help dissipate the sudden anger, though; if anything it just sinks deeper, settling in around his bones.

If there were any justice in the world Mike would get left behind tonight, but the place they all congregate is only Adam and Butcher's room, and Adam's been sticking to him like a burr ever since he got out of the showers, too keyed up to be alone.

"You know what really pisses me off?" Mike asks when there's a lag in Adam's chatter.

"No, what?"

"Really, really pisses me off," Mike clarifies. "Like I get blind with anger every time. Just want to throttle the little motherfucker who's responsible."

"Who?" Adam looks eager.

"Socks. I keep finding these sweaty, grimy, balled-up socks in the bus bathroom." Mike could go on – he's got a lot of pent-up annoyance right now, not all of it about the socks – but he just lets it hang there until Adam's face falls.

"Oh, fuck you. Don't try to make it my fault you're going through early menopause."

Mike cackles, and Adam gives him the finger as he walks off.

Settling deeper into his chair, Mike feels like he's starting to relax for the first time since they got off stage, hours ago. Giving Sisky a hard time over nothing is familiar, comforting; Mike knows exactly how far to push and what to expect when he does.

The quiet is just starting to really kick in when the door on the far side of the room opens and Tom slips in, all alone. Mike doesn't miss the way Tom's eyes scan the room and settle on him for a split second, making his shoulders tense up even as he turns and heads for the booze. Mike doesn't miss the way something in his stomach curls tight with something like anticipation, and it propels him out of his chair, into the nearest knot of people. He picks a fight with Tony over Adam's socks, which gets pretty heated because they're at that point in the tour where Tony's baseline starts at irritated and only goes up from there, and of all the things bothering Mike right now, the socks is the only safe subject.

Tony knows how to shut down an argument when it gets too ridiculous, though, leaving Mike to sulk back to his chair, all pretense of relaxation gone since Tom showed up. A movie comes on the channel that had been playing in the background and someone turns it up; Butcher sits down in the chair opposite Mike's and passes him a fresh beer. There's some sort of drinking game going on to the movie, but Mike doesn't join in.

"Bus call's at 9:30," Tony reminds them on his way out. There are vague acknowledgments from around the room, but no one really moves after the door closes behind him.

Jon makes some noise about how he should really go back to his own room, but Tom waves him back down when he starts to get up and Jon gives in with an easy shrug. Mike is pretty certain that if it was him trying to leave, Tom wouldn't stop him.

It's not fair how Tom gets to ignore him without anyone else ever noticing. Tom's lying on the nearer bed now, squished between Adam and Bill, laughing at something one of them just said. Mike can't take it, can't take the way that even with all his inhibitions down Tom can still shut Mike out. Maybe it's not even that, though – it's like Bill said; Tom is more or less always hanging around Bill, pressed right up next to him if he thinks he can get away with it, and who knows, there might even be actual puppy-dog eyes involved, though Mike has never wanted to look long enough to find out. What if this is where Tom wants to be, right where he already is? The thought makes something cold twist in Mike's gut.

Mike's fingers itch for a cigarette, but the room is non-smoking and leaving doesn't feel like an option right now.

Allowing himself a quiet grunt of frustration, Mike gets up from his chair and heads for the bathroom, leaving the door cracked open. Not that he thinks anything _will_ happen out there, but he doesn't want to miss it if it does.

There's no unusual noise from the other room, so Mike is taken unawares when the door swings against the wall with a bang and Tom stumbles in.

"Jesus," Mike says, nearly zipping his boxers into his fly in his haste to zip up. "You could at least wait till I was done."

"Sorry," Tom says. "I thought."

Mike wants to shake him and force what he was thinking out of him, but Tom's shut his mouth, fixing Mike with a really intense stare for a drunk guy.

It's fucking uncomfortable, but Mike can hold out for as long as it takes for Tom to make his move. After maybe a minute, Tom starts to sway – at first Mike thinks he might be crowding into Mike's space on purpose, but then he's just falling – and Mike moves on instinct, catching him by the shoulders and propping him up against the shower door when it becomes apparent his balance hasn't fully recovered.

"Sorry," Tom says again, letting his head roll to the side with a thunk. Mike wants to do about fifty million different things with his hands right now, like grab onto Tom's hair and make him look at Mike again, close hard around his shoulders and shake him, or twist up in his shirt to pull him closer, but before he can make up his mind about any of this, Bill shouts "You alright in there?"

They both look guiltily toward the open door, Mike wondering if he's the only one who forgot just for a second that the others were all there.

"Fine," Tom calls back.

Mike lets go of him when Tom shrugs off his hands, staring at the unreadable set of his back for a minute before following him out into the room.

Bill shoots Mike an inquiring look.

"Tom might need some help getting to his room tonight," Mike says, resuming his post on the sidelines. He picks a different wall this time, one he can see the TV from, so he can pretend he's watching.

"Don't listen t'him, I don't need any help," Tom slurs, flipping Mike off from where he's now curled in a ball on Adam's bed. Adam snorts.

"You _wish_ I would help you to your room," Mike says, giving his best leer.

Adam cracks up, then appears to remember they're fighting and changes it to a glare ("I am _not_ letting this fucker crash on my bed, we get big beds about once a _year_.") but Mike is more intent on Tom's reaction. The visible sliver of his face doesn't give anything away though, mouth stretching in an incongruous grin that could mean anything at all.

"You guys, I can get to my room fine, it's, it's just down the hall." His words are slurred and muffled by the blankets, and he laughs like something about this night has been immensely funny.

\--

The next week sees Mike gain a reputation for being the bitchiest person on the tour, which – okay, maybe he's snapping at his friends a bit more than usual, but it's no reason for even random techs to be scared of him. Seriously, he showed up for sound check the other day and the guy setting up the guitar pedals fucking bolted.

On top of it, Mike hasn't been sleeping well, which only makes him crankier. The clock on the tiny bus microwave says it's 5:13 am, which is objectively too early to be up, much less out of bed.

Mike's rummaging around in the cabinet looking for the cocoa mix (sometimes the sugar makes him sleepy, though he's not staking too much on it), when the door from the bunks slides open and someone walks in.

"Oh hey. Mike. I thought I heard..." Tom looks bleary-eyed and a bit wary, and he's already turning back in the direction he came.

Without thinking, Mike grabs his arm and steers him forcibly toward the table instead, and surprisingly, Tom sits down without a fight, though he shakes his arm free when Mike doesn't let go right away.

Mike clears his throat. "Want some hot cocoa?"

Tom shifts his weight uneasily, as if he's still thinking of sneaking away, but he nods yes.

Mike finds the mix and makes two mugs of it, setting one down in front of Tom with a small unintentional splash. The cocoa's hot, and Mike stands by the counter and sips his in silence, burning his tongue. Tom, perhaps wiser, just fidgets his mug around on the linoleum tabletop, spreading the ring of spilled liquid thinner and thinner.

There's a million questions Mike's been waiting to ask, once he got Tom alone, and a sense of urgency tugs at him, reminding him that the two of them have never been alone for more than a couple minutes before someone walks in or Tom sneaks away. Except for Pennsylvania.

"So there's this thing," Mike starts, and Tom twitches, fingers tensing around the handle of his mug. "This thing you have," Mike continues, not letting himself stop. "And I just, I need to know, is it a me thing or Bill thing? Because I really can't tell."

Tom looks up sharply then, just in time for Mike to bite off the _And it's making me a little crazy_ that was about to come out. He chokes out a sort of high-pitched giggle that's the least humorous sound Mike has ever heard. "It's kind of both, isn't it?"

Mike honestly hadn't expected the conversation to last even this long without interruption. "Wait – what?"

"It can't be just a you or Bill thing, that doesn't even make any sense. Like –" Tom makes a complicated wavy hand gesture, then gives up.

"Huh," says Mike, thrown by this non-answer.

"Yeah." Tom shrugs, almost apologetic.

Outside it's starting to get light out, and Tom stares determinedly out the window, taking long gulps of his cocoa. They're passing through the Midwest now, and the view outside is of steady unbroken corn fields, not a tree or a house in sight. Mike watches the tight lines of Tom's body, sipping more slowly at his own cocoa. He really hadn't planned how this part of the conversation would go.

"So there is a thing," he starts, because he doesn't think he heard Tom actually deny that part.

"Oh my god." Tom says, scrubbing his hands over his face and through his hair. Mike thinks he sees a blush spread up his neck, but maybe it's just from the sunrise. The sky is kind of a ridiculous color right now.

Mike wants to ask what kind of a thing it is, and how it could possibly be too complicated to even articulate, because it's definitely not that complicated on his end. Or it wouldn't be, if Tom wasn't making it that way.

"Jesus, Mike, stop brooding so hard. You're going to strain something."

"I wasn't brooding," Mike says. He rummages in the cabinets and makes himself a bowl of cereal, more for something to do with his hands than because he's actually hungry this early.

"You've been brooding all week," Tom says, fiddling with his empty mug again.

"Nope," Mike says, thinking _fuck it_ and sliding into the seat opposite Tom at the small table. "This is no ordinary moodiness, I'm going through the early stages of menopause. Haven't you been listening to Sisky?"

Tom's scowl stays firmly in place, but he huffs out a tiny chuckle.

This reaction does nothing to justify the sudden glee Mike feels, but he grins anyway. The other questions are still jostling at the tip of his tongue, and he still feels vaguely pissed off at everything, but he can't think of how to make the words come out right. For right now it seems like enough to sit there together looking out the window. He does wonder though, about that tight feeling in his chest and the way Tom won't look at him.

The bus hits a bump in the road, and without really thinking about it Mike lets his legs jostle against Tom's, and then lets them stay there, all tangled together in the cramped space under the table. There's a few seconds' lag where Mike gets to enjoy Tom's flannel-clad legs soft against Mike's bare shins; then Tom makes an undignified squeaking sound and scrambles up from the table, hitting his knee with a hollow crack and stepping all over Mike's feet.

He's halfway across the tiny kitchen area before Mike can even register the movement.

"I just remembered I've got to go, um, there's some stuff," he says, and is gone.

"Huh," Mike says, and for all that he should be more pissed off than ever now, he's grinning kind of stupidly.

–

By mid afternoon the exhaustion has caught up with Mike and made his menopause come back again, and Tom seems to have gone back to avoiding him completely. They don't have a show that day, only some stupid radio station thing that Tony doesn't tell them will involve a signing after he's herded them all off the bus.

There's an interview, and then some kind of stupid questions-from-a-hat game the host seems way too enthusiastic about. None of the questions have anything to do with anything, and it only makes Mike brood harder when the other guys actually seem to be having fun with them.

"Tell us about your latest crush." The question is accompanied by badly-restrained laughter from Butcher and Adam's side of the couch. The host aims the microphone squarely at Mike.

"I don't have any crushes," Mike says, scowling. "What is this, middle school?"

"Not even a tiny little one? No one you fancy back home – or maybe someone you've met on the road?" The host grins encouragingly and shoves the mic closer into his face.

"None." Mike doesn't let himself look across to see if Tom's shoulders are hunching like he imagines they are. Whatever it is, Tom will get over it.

After the interview there's the signing, and Mike surprises himself by making a beeline for the empty chair next to Tom. Tom perks up but angles himself away when Mike sits down, and Mike wonders how, if Tom's so transparent, he can be so hard to figure out.

"Hey," Mike says, resting a hand on Tom's shoulder.

Tom shrugs him off, his expression resigned.

"Hey, c'mon," Mike says. He scoots his chair closer to Tom's. "Don't be like that."

The legs of the folding table they're sitting behind are in the way of Tom pushing his own chair farther away, but Mike doesn't miss that he tries. They're all jammed together in a row behind the table, Bill at the top of the line, and by the time people get down to the far end, they're mostly done chatting, happy to collect their CDs and posters and t-shirts and whatever else and go. Mike signs a kid's journal with one hand and slips his other underneath the table, finding Tom's knee.

Tom scowls at Mike, who scowls back, not lifting his hand from Tom's knee. Tom doesn't really say anything, though, or try to shake Mike off again, and after a while Mike feels the tension go out of him. Something flutters in his chest. Their legs are pressed together now, from hip to knee, and Mike lets his hand slide higher, curling possessively over the side of Tom's thigh.

"Asshole," Tom mutters at him, shifting restlessly.

"Mhmm," Mike says, neither an agreement or a disagreement.

Tom knocks the bony part of his knee into Mike, not hard enough to really hurt. Mike just slides his hand an inch further down Tom's leg, letting his fingertips dig in possessively. Tom coughs in a way that sounds suspiciously like laughter.

"Are you ticklish?" Mike hisses, incredulous.

"Nope," says Tom, but the corners of his mouth are twitching up.

Mike digs his fingers in more deliberately, searching out the sensitive spots. He watches Tom out of the corners of his eyes, keeping his own face neutral but anticipating a reaction any moment now...

Sure enough, Tom's eyes crinkle up and he hunches over, trying to hold in a laugh, and Mike charitably stops tickling, his point made. "Fuck you, Mike," Tom says once he has control over his breathing again. His voice is low and hoarse, without any rancor.

It would be easy to keep prodding at Tom until he pushes him into anger, but Mike finds that his sour mood has dissolved while he wasn't paying attention, and he doesn't feel like inviting more anger just yet. What he wants in this moment is to make Tom smile harder, more directly, aim it all at Mike. There's the fact that they're still in the middle of a signing to consider, though, so Mike settles for their small points of contact under the table, keeping his hand on Tom's leg. The confidence humming under his skin feels a lot like happiness.

\--

Mike wakes up for good around 2:30 am, after a period of what could only loosely be called sleep in the first place. There had been time for a Walmart run after the radio thing, then they'd been on the road again. A festive atmosphere had prevailed in the bus, fueled by an excess of snack food and energy drinks and bargain bin movies. Tom had gone back to pretending to ignore Mike, but Mike was pretty sure now that's what it was, just pretending, and the tension of the past few days had quickly thawed. Mike hadn't expected to have any trouble sleeping that night.

But here he is at two thirty in the morning, wide awake, his pillow feeling uncomfortable no matter how he flipped it, his blankets clammy. Giving up, he pulls on a hoodie and goes into the back lounge. Someone forgot to turn off the DVD player, and the room is filled with the blue glow of the home screen. Mike picks up a movie at random and hits play, falling back on the couch with the remote in his hand.

He doesn't expect to fall asleep again, but that must be what happens, because a shift in the cadence of the wheels on the road wakes him up a while later. He glances out the window and sees the lights of a toll plaza receding behind them. It's not till he looks around in the other direction, rolling a crick out of his neck, that he sees Tom is basically right there, slouched on the floor next to the couch.

"Fuck," Mike says. He sits up a little. "You startled me."

"Sorry," Tom says. He's sitting with his back against the wall, angled away from the TV where the movie's still playing, as if he was watching Mike, instead.

"Couldn't sleep either?" Mike asks.

"I thought I heard you out here," Tom says.

"I must have been pretty boring company." He doesn't mean for it to come out like an apology, and sort of winces when it does. If Tom gets his kicks from doing nothing more than watching Mike sleep, that's his problem.

"No, it's okay –" Tom cuts himself off, reaching out abruptly toward Mike's face, then cuts that off too, letting his hand fall to the couch.

Mike wants to grab Tom's hand, pull on it and make him continue whatever motion he'd almost started, but he forces himself to keep still, waiting Tom out.

A look of determination flashes across Tom's face, giving Mike about half a second of notice before Tom moves, crowding up into Mike's space, their faces nearly bumping together. Tom slides his hand up to cup Mike's jaw, steadying, but the kiss still lands off-center. Mike turns into it without thinking, catching a burn of stubble against his skin before he opens his mouth and everything's hot and slick. The angle is still awkward, with Tom half-kneeling on the floor and one of Mike's arms trapped under his body. He can't do much more than lean into the kiss, but Tom's fingers twist in the hair at the back of his neck, holding him steady.

"C'mon up here," Mike says, tugging on Tom's shoulder with his free hand. This whole thing would be better with more friction; Mike has ideas about pulling Tom up onto the couch with him and rolling them over until Tom's wedged between Mike and the cushions, pliant and warm under Mike's hands.

Apparently Tom has other ideas, though, as evinced by the way he worms out of Mike's grasp and attacks Mike's belt with the same single-minded determination he'd kissed Mike with.

"Hey, hey," Mike says, not because he's exactly _averse_ to this turn of events, but it's just taking his mind a second to reel back from where it had been.

"Would you just, ugh. Let me do this." Tom gets Mike's jeans open and jerks them down to his knees with far more force than necessary, making Mike wince when the rough material catches on his thighs. "Move," Tom says, pushing at Mike's legs, and Mike hurries to comply. His limbs feel clumsy and heavy, but he's also ridiculously turned on by this pushy, determined version of Tom. The little growly noises Tom makes when he doesn't move fast enough don't help, at all.

Tom's nails scrape on Mike's stomach as he pulls down his boxers, and Mike bites his lip, tasting blood. His head is swimming, it's all too much, but Tom isn't stopping. He wraps his hand around Mike's dick and sucks the head into his mouth, humming slightly.

The whole time, Tom's hands are hot on Mike's skin, holding him steady, the thumbs digging in next to his hipbones just a little. It's not nearly enough to leave marks later, and Mike spares a tiny bit of attention to feel sorry for this. He tries to stay still, let Tom do his thing, but Tom won't settle on just one thing, sucking and licking and changing angle and murmuring things that sound really sexy, for all they are incomprehensible with Tom's mouth occupied the way it was. Maybe he arches up into Tom's mouth; he's trying to be careful but it's getting hard to concentrate, but whatever it is, Tom is taking Mike in deep and digging his fingers into his hips, not stopping or letting up. Mike jerks up once, involuntarily, before he comes.

"Oh," he says on a shaky exhale. His nerves are all buzzing with pleasure still, and he reaches down, meaning to pull him up for another kiss and maybe convince him to get up on the couch where they could get a bit more creative. Any number of impossible things seem possible now.

"Hey, wait," Mike says when Tom gets to his feet and his immediate trajectory does not bring him closer to Mike.

Tom looks back over his shoulder at him, something skittish in all the lines of his body.

"What about you?" And then, when that only makes Tom shrink away further, "Fuck, how much of an asshole do you think I actually am?"

A pained look crosses Tom's face, as if he's actually afraid of having to give an answer, and heavy and post-orgasmic as Mike is, it's enough to get him off the couch and across the space between him and Tom. He grabs Tom by the neck, the shirt, fingers twisting in the damp cotton as he walks them back to the couch. His lips find Tom's as soon as they land on the couch, Mike on top this time so Tom can’t escape, and he kisses him, hard, hands bunching tighter in Tom's shirt until it occurs to him just to take it off. There's so much bare skin, then, that Mike has to pause and take it all in for a moment, but a whimper from Tom brings his attention back up to where he's watching Mike with round eyes, looking almost ready to bolt again.

"Hey, whoa, don't do that," Mike says, stripping off his own shirt.

Tom emits a high-pitched laugh. "What? Do what? What am I doing?"

"Don't think so much, it's freaking you out," Mike says. You can't be friends with William Beckett for any length of time without learning all about what an overthinking-induced freakout looks like, and this is definitely one of those. This thing between them is so close to breaking out of its frustrating loop into something more like pure gratification; Mike's not about to let a freakout set them back now. He grabs Tom's wrists and holds them loosely against the arm of the couch over his head, shifting so he can pin Tom down with his body.

"Don't," Tom says, tugging against Mike's hold.

All the frustration Mike thought was gone for good boils up to the surface. "Why _not_?" he demands. "Don't you want to?"

"It's enough for _you_ that you want to, sure," Tom bites back. "You're like Bill's best friend."

"What – the _fuck_ – does Bill have to do with any of this?" If the past twenty-four hours hadn't shown which one Tom was really interested in, the blow job just now should have been proof positive.

"It's – fuck, none of this is about Bill." Tom's still tense under Mike, but he's starting to look more pissed off than freaked out.

"You just said it was!" Mike exclaims, forgetting to keep his voice low.

"But not like _that_ , jesus, Mike, it's –" Tom surges up and kisses Mike hard, mostly teeth, hooking a leg around his hips and pulling him down, letting him feel the erection very obviously still there.

"If you would stop being an idiot for just ten minutes," Tom says when he breaks the kiss, still panting, "then we could just, I don't know, it could be easy."

"But what about Bill?"

"He'd just be thrilled if he found out, wouldn't he?" Tom's voice is creeping back up toward the panic octaves.

"What if he doesn't find out?" Mike asks.

"He'll find out," Tom insists.

"So?" Mike punctuates his question with a purposeful roll of his hips, grinding against Tom's cock in a slow tease.

"Fuck, Mike," Tom gasps and surges up, squirming his hands out of Mike's grasp and pulling him down into a desperate, open-mouthed kiss. Mike sucks Tom's lower lip into his mouth and bites down, grinning into the messy kiss. This feels like victory, or if not that, something close. Perhaps a truce.

He shoves his hand into Tom's shorts and Tom gasps again, throwing his head back as Mike's hand closes around his cock. Mike buries his face in the crook of Tom's neck, licking the salt from his skin where the sweat has collected. He scrapes his teeth across the place his tongue had been and Tom groans and arches up, grinding against Mike when he doesn't move fast enough. Mike jerks him off hard and fast then, not stopping until Tom comes. Tom squirms to get out from under him almost at once, panting hard, and Mike rolls off, landing half on the floor. He tips his head back on the couch, staring up at the ceiling as their breathing slows.

The whole lounge smells like sex, and Mike can't help but feel a keen sense of personal accomplishment over this fact. Even if it was technically Tom who made the first move. He cranes his head around, trying to catch sight of Tom up on the couch.

"So hey," he says, and has to clear his throat and start over because it comes out so hoarse and wrecked up.

"Hey back," Tom says, his own voice soft. Mike thinks he can still hear the raw aftereffects of the blow job in it.

"So yeah," Mike says. "Any time you feel like doing that again? Feel free not to be an elusive bastard about it for two months beforehand. Like seriously. You could have made a move like that back in Pennsylvania and I think I'd have been down for it."

There's a strangled, incredulous noise, and the back of a hand connects none too gently with the side of Mike's head.

"Fuck, _ow_ ," Mike exclaims, but it doesn't stop him from grabbing the hand and tugging until he's pulled Tom down enough to kiss him, which he does, licking at the corners of his open mouth and biting at his already-swollen lips. "Seriously, Tom, seriously," he says, and even though Tom just kisses back, bunching his hand in Mike's hair, Mike figures that's answer enough for now.

"Seriously," he says again though, just in case.


End file.
